Hummingbirds and Memory

March is the month for welcoming our Rufous hummingbirds back to Anacortes. I saw our first one here on March 14, the day we returned from a ten-day trip to Baja California. I usually try to keep this blog focused on Pacific Northwest birding but you will need to bear with me a little on this posting.


My wife and I moved to the PacNW in 2001 after living in the same house in Austin, TX for about ten years. We were fortunate enough to be able to live relatively near downtown but have a wonderful greenbelt with a creek along the back of the house and a large vacant lot immediately adjacent. While the location was wonderful we were somewhat stymied by all of our shade (large pecan trees) and were unable to grow flowers in the yard, which would have helped us attract hummingbirds. I tried for several years to attract the predominant Black-chinned hummingbird to feeders at the house in the spring or summer but was never successful although they are abundant in the general Austin area. The Black-chinned hummingbirds not only migrated through our area, but they also bred in our area. But I was simply unable to attract the birds to a feeder in the spring or summer and finally gave up trying.

Fall was another matter. I noticed that we had some migrants that would pass through in early September, so I began putting one or two feeders out in the fall. My computer allows me a little more sophisticated reminder of when to put the feeders out now, but back then my stimulus was the appearance of the first hummingbird in the fall.

Every fall, without fail, one or more hummingbirds would appear at the same place the feeders had been the previous year and begin to look for the feeder. They would fly to the exact spot where the feeder had been in the front yard or above the rear deck and do a slow turn looking for the feeders that had been in those locations! That was my cue to perform a crash production of sugar-water and get a feeder out… pronto! There was no way to tell whether I was attracting a couple of hummingbirds or several hummingbirds but they would frequent the feeders for about three weeks before continuing on their migration.

Since we didn’t keep feeders out in the spring or summer, and kept them out for only about three weeks in the fall, these Black-chinned hummingbirds had to remember for an entire year the previous location of our hummingbird feeders and that they were only available for the fall portion of their migration! We never observed either the hummingbirds or this behavior in the spring. And ours was only one stop for a bird that migrates hundreds of miles each year lending me to believe that our location probably wasn’t the only one they held in memory.

Back to the PacNW. This past week I noticed one of our returning Rufous hummingbirds (our predominant species which breeds here during the spring and early summer) return to the wire hanging from our Pacific yew tree where I had hung a feeder last year. It was obviously looking for the feeder that had been hung there last season. We’re not discussing only locating a yard, but the exact location of last year’s feeder! It wasn’t there… I had moved it to another limb at a location about ten feet away. The hummingbird quickly found the feeder’s new location, but the point is that a second species of hummingbird obviously remembered the exact location of the feeder from the previous year! In this case this could have been a bird that had bred here and therefore had several months to imprint the feeder’s exact location, but still at least seven months had passed with two migrations of several hundred miles each prior to the bird returning to the exact location of the feeder.